I was in a meeting for the first 45 minutes but I hear I didn’t miss much. Happy customer use cases.

The first big theme of this morning’s keynote is “Containers” – often just shorthand for “docker.” I went to a previous event here in town with even large enterprises and government – State of Texas, Microsoft, Dell, Red Hat – all freaking out about Docker. Docker is similar to VMWare or cloud in that it is a new technology that requires new monitoring and management just for it. (Heck, Eric, the CopperEgg founder, is now running a startup around docker container management, StackEngine.)

Keynote from pristine.io about how they implemented. Docker, the new low overhead containerization technology, is a heavily cited part of the power (they actually used Flux7 as the expert consultants, they’re based here in Austin!).

Keynote from Werner Vogels on the new “Amazon EC2 Container Service,” announced to cheers and applause. It allows launching and terminating containers to sets of instances on EC2. Their PM did a demo where they had a big farm of r3 servers and then they deploy a redis cluster and rabbitmq across them, and then front end components on a farm of c3s, and then audio processing across all of them. If you’re new to this it’s basically VMs within VMs but without noticeable overhead.

EC2 Container Service

Next they had the actual docker cofounder and CEO Ben Golub. He mentioned that docker is only 18 months old and its huge success and ecosystem this early in is “surreal.”

Next… Leapfrogging PaaS?

Werner is back to announce AWS Lambda available now in preview – event-driven computing service for dynamic applications. No instance running/management required, events go in and “cloud functions” run on them. Holy shit, this replaces a large number of servers running semi-trivial apps. 20 cents per million requests, plus some complex stuff for seconds of execution – free for 3.2M seconds/1M requests.

Amazon Lambda

Netflix chief product guy came on to show how they’re using lambda as a higher level abstraction and have eliminated a bunch of servers – no system monitoring/management, no inefficient polling, no gaps/opacity. They’re using it to encode video, run backups, run security and compliance checks against instances, and for operational monitoring and dashboards. Replacing procedural control systems with event-driven services.

AWS core innovations… New c4 instance, Haswell based (crazy fast processor, 36 vCPUs). Diane Bryant, SVP/GM Data Center Group from Intel, came on to go into the CPU specifically. Larger and faster EBS volumes, up to 20,000 IOPS. Enhanced and consistent networking speeds.

The container engine is cool – it’ll certainly remove a lot of instance gerrymandering and instance reservation pain if nothing else. But Lambda is the potential disruptor here. It’s taking the idea of “bring your own algorithm” from MapReduce and saying “hmmm you can probably replace your trivial web app just with this” – it’s halfway between a PaaS and a SaaS, none of the Beanstalk complexity, just “here take this function and run it on stuff when it comes in.” If a library of common lambas becomes available, so much computing work done for trivial purposes becomes obsoleted. Who hasn’t seen a Web service to “upload a file here, then zip it or something, then store it…” OK, no servers needed any more. Very interesting.

New product announcement for Aurora – new commercial-grade database engine – fully MySQL compatible but 5x the performance, available through Amazon RDS, 1/10 the cost of the commercial DB engines (starts at 29 cents an hour, ~$210/mo). Can do 6M inserts/second and 30M selects/second. Highly durable (11 9’s), crash recovery in seconds with no data loss. Nice!

SLDC stuff!

CodeDeploy (was internal tool called Apollo), a new code-deployment system that lets you do rolling updates, rollbacks, and tracks deployment health. This works for all languages and is free. They use it internally for 95 deploys/hour on their own stuff.

In early 2015 will come some more software lifecycle management services – first is CodePipeline for continuous integration and deployment (also used internally)

Second is CodeCommit as a managed code repository that can colocate with where you’re going to deploy and has no size limits of repos or files. These “integrate with” github, jenkins, chef, etc. though it’s not clear how they don’t cannibalize them.

Security stuff! Big push to be able to say “we easily surpass the security you can do on premise.”

FISMA, ITAR, FIPS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO 9001

Current encryption approach is either “let Amazon manage keys” or use their CloudHSM hosted key thing, both of which are still a pain. As a result they’re launching AWS Key Management Service as a HA service that manages keys, provides one-click encryption and transparent key rotation.

AWS Config is a new-gen agile CMDB with full visibility into all your AWS resources. You can query it and see relationships and show scope of a config change. Streams all config changes out to you.

A new-gen service catalog called AWS Service Catalog available early 2015. Create and share product portfolios, let internal people launch them, tracking and compliance.

Enterprise Cloud Adoption Patterns

Often the first wave of moving into the cloud for enterprises is moving dev and test environments to run in AWS for flexibility and spin up/down for cost savings and brand new apps, custom written for the cloud

Third wave is business critical applications. Macmillan and Hoya run their SAP in AWS. Conde Nast runs HR and Legal there.

New wave – you’re starting to see entire datacenter migration and consolidation as DCs come up for lease (Hess, Conde Nast, NewsCorp). SunCorp. Time Inc., GPT, Nippon Express moving “all in” to AWS – many ISVs as well. The CIA moved to AWS and now Intuit is doing so now as well.

Intuit moved their “TurboTax AnswerXchange” app there to deal with tax time peaks last year and the scales fell from their eyes when they did so – 6x cost cut, setup 1/5 of the time, faster development. They started doing more and realized the global datacenters, ease of integration with acquisitions, and dev recruiting benefits. They have 33 services on AWS now, and have moved mint.com there. They have decided to move everything else there now. Funny how once companies start looking at how much they accomplish instead of just the monthly cost the “cloud is more expensive at scale” argument gets dropped like a flaming bag of poo.

Hybrid cloud

Various stuff like directory service (AD in the cloud) and identity federation and storage gateway and SystemCenter and vCenter integration already exist to power mixed shops

Johnson & Johnson went on for a while about their use of AWS. They are planning a 25,000 seat deployment of Workspaces (virtual desktop offering, like Citrix).

Whew, that’s the quick notes version. Aurora is obviously of interest – a lot of the fretting over whether to use mySQL or RDS I’ve seen will get settled by this – it was just ‘well, run the same thing yourself or have them do it…” and now it’s “have them run something insanely better”. But the SDLC tools are also interesting – they made noise about how these “work with!” ansible, jenkins, git, etc. but that seems mildly disingenuous, without any more looking into it yet they sound more like direct competition for them. But the config and service catalog could be great extensions – yay for simple composable services, not huge painful “BSM/ITMOM suites”.

Feel free and share your thoughts on the announcements in the comments section!